For residents and the surrounding nature areas, the construction of the controversial express train route, High Speed ​​2 (HS2), from the British capital to the north is hell.

The largest construction site in Europe is proving to be a paradise for archeology.

Infrastructure project developers are obliged to carry out excavations before construction begins.

That is why, since 2019, more than a thousand archaeologists have been working at around sixty individual sites along the first 240-kilometer route of the project between London and Birmingham.

Several revealing finds have already been made.

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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Last week, in the last phase of an excavation near the commuter town of Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, three Roman busts were added, which lay under the foundations of a Norman church.

At the beginning of September, the excavation team there proudly announced that they had come across a square structure with flint walls, which they believed to be the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon tower.

In the meantime, the “unique” discovery of the stone heads suggests that it was a Roman mausoleum.

A journey through millennia of British history

It is probably a woman with the elaborate curly hairstyle of the Roman Empire, a man and a child. The shoulders of two of the stone heads have also been preserved. The heads of the adults measure around 25 centimeters, the torso around thirty centimeters. They were severed at some point, as was often the case with earlier versions of today's monument fall actions. The excavations also unearthed well-preserved fragments of a hexagonal Roman jar, Roman roof tiles, painted plaster, Roman cremation urns, and an Anglo-Saxon coin and Anglo-Saxon pottery.

The site is located under a church built immediately after the Norman church, which was abandoned after the construction of another church in the late Victorian period and left to decay.

In 1966 the fragile remains were finally demolished.

Now, like many other sites along the planned route, the area overgrown with vegetation reveals its secrets.

The lost coffin of an explorer

The high-speed train - which was planned long before Boris Johnson's mission to equalize living conditions with the very aim of counteracting the north-south divide - turns out to be a journey through millennia of British history by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer society in the Surrounding present-day Watford on Edgecote Moor near Banbury, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the Wars of the Roses, up to Victorian times. At the end of the route in Birmingham there is a cemetery, from which researchers hope to gain insight into living conditions in the industrial age by analyzing DNA samples from the corpse finds.

At the beginning of the route, not far from London's Euston station, Matthew Flinders' lost coffin was recovered in 2019.

The explorer who first circumnavigated Australia at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the grandfather of the Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who pioneered the systematic methodology of archeology.

Meanwhile, the subject in Britain has been shut down so that archeology is one of the shortage occupations for which exceptions are made under the immigration system that has been in place since Brexit.